he planet Flashfever is a biological and botanical conundrum; virtually all of its life forms are uncanny living batteries that generate, store and explosively release electrical energy to feed or defend themselves. Thus, when one of the members of the Flashfever planetary survey team is found burned to death, the cause isn't immediately clear. He could have foolishly run into one of the planet's various energy-shooting animals or plants. He could have been killed by the incomprehensible sprookjes, Flashfever's birdish dominant species. Or he could have been murdered by someone on his own team.
It falls to Tocohl Susumo, a trader from the planet Hellspark (pronounced alternately as "Hell's-park" and "Hell-spark," to encourage the linguistic fluidity necessary for trade among dozens of races), to try to unravel the mystery. The surveyor's death came at a critical time--the team, a tense assortment of touchy individuals whose distinctive cultural taboos and beliefs are in severe conflict, is almost ready to formally decide whether the sprookjes are sapient. A "yes" report will mean the planet belongs to the native creatures. A "no" report will open the planet for commercial development, quite probably dooming the sprookjes altogether.
Possibly, the dead man knew something that would prove the case one way or another and was therefore murdered to ensure his silence. But to unravel that, Tocohl has to decide for herself whether the sprookjes are "people"--a question that's baffled the survey team for years.
Broad strokes, big laughs
Janet Kagan's lamentably few books are hard to find--Uhura's Song, a brilliantly executed Star Trek novel that makes most of the other Trek dreck look like the literary equivalent of Mad Libs, was the only one of her three works in print until Meisha Merlin brought this treasure back into stores. Like Uhuru's Song, Hellspark is nominally a first-contact novel, nominally a mystery, and actually a stunningly creative, complex, humorous and eminently readable slalom course through a diversity of alien prejudices, mindsets, languages and ideas.
Kagan's books don't have much in the way of villains--her worlds are unusually friendly places, populated almost exclusively with cheery, curious, good-humored, intelligent people who eventually find the complex barriers separating them are simple misunderstandings. Oddly, this unalloyed optimism doesn't read as naive or childish in Hellspark. Kagan's elegantly slapdash writing style and her unerring sense for character and language keep the story moving along at breakneck speed, even when the threats are mere gentle speed bumps along the road to blissful and wistfully natural mutual cooperation.
Most significantly, Kagan manages in a few broad strokes to establish a dozen fascinating individuals and make their surmountably minor conflicts more momentous than the murder mystery itself. Possibly there are too many characters here, treated too briefly to make this drama read too seriously. But mostly the book just seems short because it's such a free, easy and rollickingly funny read.
